Australia’s Government-owned air traffic control provider, Airservices, is on the hunt for an external IT partner to take charge of its technology infrastructure outsourcing overhaul.

Airservices put out a request for proposal on 24 August for the provision of infrastructure-as-a-service, saying that it wants to engage the local IT community to partner with a vendor capable of helping it transform its IT service delivery infrastructure.

The move comes roughly four months after the organisation issued a request for information (RFI), in a bid to work out the best way to transition from an internally-managed IT environment to a fully managed services scenario in partnership with third party suppliers.

Ultimately, the organisation wants to shift from an internally managed environment to an externally provisioned, commodity-based, agile managed service capable of providing “right sized ICT services” throughout the contract term.

The successful supplier will be engaged to modernise Airservices’ core compute and end user compute environments, delivering a commercially viable solution that will meet Airservices current computing needs now and into the future.

Airservices’ core compute and end user compute environments are currently managed in-house and comprise of 150 physical servers, providing platform services for application hosting as well as the virtualisation platform, which offers 600 virtual machines.

The project itself is expected to see the relocation and management – including support and maintenance – of the organisation’s end user compute functions and core compute functions, with the lucky service provider set to supply associated data centre facilities, support services and infrastructure.

At present, Airservices’ core computing infrastructure involves internally-owned and managed data centres in Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane as well as a presence in a data centre in Canberra.

The deal will heavily involve managed services provided on a flexible performance basis, covering all Airservices locations, including remote sites.

The resultant contract set to arise from the tender process is anticipated to result in a reduction in whole-of-life costs, an emphasis on service management, relationship governance, contract management and service provider performance, and deliver an active partner willing to proactively collaborate with Airservices and “share risk”.

The call for industry feedback over its IT infrastructure overhaul comes as Airservices takes heat from the Australian National Audit Office over the long-running procurement process of its OneSKY system, which aims to combine civil and military air traffic control management systems into one program.